Advances in compression techniques for audio-visual information have resulted in cost effective and widespread recording, storage, and/or transfer of movies, video, and/or music content over a wide range of media. The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) family of standards is among the most commonly used digital compressed formats. A major advantage of MPEG compared to other video and audio coding formats is that MPEG-generated files tend to be much smaller for the same quality. This is because MPEG uses sophisticated compression techniques. However, MPEG compression may be lossy and, in some instances, it may distort the video content. In this regard, the more the video is compressed, that is, the higher the compression ratio, the less the reconstructed video retains the original information. Some examples of MPEG video distortion are loss of textures, details, and/or edges. MPEG compression may also result in ringing on sharper edges and/or discontinuities on block edges. Because MPEG compression techniques are based on defining blocks of video image samples for processing, MPEG compression may also result in visible “macroblocking” that may result due to bit errors. In MPEG, a macroblock is an area covered by a 16×16 array of luma samples in a video image. Luma may refer to a component of the video image that represents brightness. Moreover, noise due to quantization operations, as well as aliasing and/or temporal effects may all result from the use of MPEG compression operations.
When MPEG video compression results in loss of detail in the video image it is said to “blur” the video image. In this regard, operations that are utilized to reduce compression-based blur are generally called image enhancement operations. When MPEG video compression results in added distortion on the video image it is said to produce “artifacts” on the video image. For example, the term “mosquito noise” may refer to MPEG artifacts that may be caused by the quantization of high spatial frequency components in the image. In another example, the term “block noise” may refer to MPEG artifacts that may be caused by the quantization of low spatial frequency information in the image. Block noise may appear as edges on 8×8 blocks and may give the appearance of a mosaic or tiling pattern on the video image.
There may be some systems that attempt to remove video noise. However, the systems may comprise a data buffer for each of the clients that may be processing the video data. The redundancy of the video buffers may be expensive in terms of chip layout area and power consumed. The various clients may produce processed video data that may be used by other clients and/or combined to create a single output. In order to blend the video data, all of the various video data must be synchronized. Decentralized synchronization may be complex and require much coordination. As the video processing systems get larger, the problems related with chip layout area, power required, and synchronization of the various video streams may be exacerbated.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.